


Give Up The Ghost

by verucasalt123



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Community: spnspringfling, Demon Sex, Ficlet, Guilty Dean Winchester, Insomniac Dean, M/M, Mark of Cain, Memories, Past Relationship(s), Past Ruby/Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 05:38:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6410968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verucasalt123/pseuds/verucasalt123
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean can't shake the memories from his demonic adventures with Crowley.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Up The Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jalu2](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jalu2).



> Written for jalu2 for the 2016 spnspringfling

Dean drinks. He tosses. He turns. He paces. He drinks some more. 

None of it works. 

He’s home. He’s safe in the Bunker with Sam and Castiel. Although...

There are any number of things that could be keeping him awake tonight. Guilt is always at the top of the list - he thinks of what he did to his brother, how Sam had been so desperate to find him that he’d crossed almost every line imaginable. Dean thinks about The Mark, what it had done to him, what it is still doing to him. 

Sam may have _cured_ Dean of being a demon, but that doesn’t mean all of the ugliness inside him is gone. 

The Mark aches on the skin of his arm, but that isn’t the only problem. The Mark is _on_ his skin. 

Crowley is _under_ his skin. 

Dean knows that in the past, he’s trusted Crowley more than he should have. Everyone he knows, all of his friends, everyone he’s ever known since Crowley turned up in their lives, they had all warned him. 

Maybe they could see something Dean couldn’t. Maybe they just saw what Dean never wanted to see. 

He hears Crowley inside of his head, just as real as if he were standing right there. Sometimes it sounds so real that Dean looks around the room. He doesn’t think Crowley is dead. No reason to think that. 

Crowley can’t be a ghost, anyway. Right? He’s not human, he’s got no soul, so how would he manage to hang around and haunt Dean or anyone else? 

Sitting back down on his bed, Dean gives in to the memories. Laughing. Drinking. Playing pool. Shooting darts. All of it feels like a haunting. Even the other parts of his demon-adventure-vacation. The parts he knows he’ll never tell Sam, or Cas, or anyone, ever. 

Sam wouldn’t understand it, though Dean knows Sam’s been with a demon before. 

That was years ago, now. Sam thought Ruby wanted to help him, Sam was desperate, Sam was in the tight grip of addiction when he’d done all that. 

Dean hadn’t been any of those things. As much fun as he’d been having with Crowley, there was no crisis of conscience when Crowley had pushed the flirting a bit too far and Dean had taken him up on it. Dean was the one whose spirit had shaken the first time they’d gone to bed together, Crowley’s cold heart seeming to hide away. 

He stands up and starts pacing again. He can’t be still as the images flood his mind. Dean had never been with a man before, hadn’t really even thought about it, not until that distance between them had closed.

It’s almost like he can still feel all of it; Crowley’s touch, his kiss, his embrace. It hadn’t been sweet, Dean knows that; sleeping together had always satisfied _something_ in him, at least a part of him, but Crowley’s evil (and maybe Dean’s own evil) shines like a bright light in his memory through the cracks around the parts of them that are human (and yes, part of Crowley is still human, so maybe part of Dean is still demon). Their nights together always came just short of complete satisfaction, always ended with blood and bruises. 

Being unclothed together in bed, sharing something that had somehow resembled intimacy, didn’t seem to be all that much different than any other time they’d shared for those months. To Dean, it all bleeds together in his memory; the lines between the emotional intimacy and the physical blurring until...well, it’s still blurred in Dean’s mind.

There are moments when the pain is a physical thing. Dean wants to think it’s the pain of remembering the things he’s done, but he knows better. If he looks at it closely enough, he can clearly see that it’s the pain of having been separated from Crowley after all that time. Dean doesn’t want to hold a magnifying glass to any of it anyway.

And there’s nothing to be done for it. The pain won’t be washed out any more than the regret or the anger or the self-loathing. Certainly won’t be washed out with whatever pieces of demon are still left inside him.

He can pretend, and he knows he’ll have to. It’s not like he won’t ever see Crowley again, and Dean knows the feelings he has now will fade with time. At least he hopes so. Truth is, he’s never learned how to deal with separation in a healthy way, not with anyone he’s lost, and that’s a lot of people. It’s not a secret, either - just another weapon Crowley can and most likely will use against him when the opportunity arises.

Dean crawls back under the covers, hoping there’s still a chance that he might sleep for a while. He knows what’s waiting for him in his dreams, but there’s no way around that. This isn’t something he can salt and burn.

Sleep is a necessity; he and Sam have both learned that lesson the hard way, more than once over their lifetimes. Dean can’t allow the ghost of what he’d shared with Crowley to keep him awake forever. All he can do is hope the haunting will stop eventually.


End file.
